You live here on this planet somewhere and everything
that you've ever known is located right here,
but just how small exactly is Earth
when compared to the scale of the entire universe?
Let's start by zooming out to
where we can see our nearest cosmic neighbor, The Moon.
You may think that the
moon is very close to Earth since it
dominates our night skies. But in reality
the moon isn't this close to our planet,
it's actually about this far away.
384,400 kilometers away from you right now on average.
You could fit 30 entire
Earths in between this distance and if
you somehow were able to drive a car at
a constant 100 km/h speed, it would take
you about 160 days to drive the entire distance.
Despite this incredible distance however,
12 humans have actually set foot here
representing the farthest away that any
individual human has ever been away from
the Earth and one of humanity's greatest achievements.
This is what the Earth
would look like from there, if you were
standing there with them.
And if you wanted to communicate with somebody back
at home, it would take a message about
2 1/2 seconds to travel between
you and them since that's how fast the
speed of light can travel at.
This is a photo that was taken on Mars and that
tiny dot that you see there is Earth as
seen from the Martian surface.
On average, Mars is an incredible 225
million kilometers away from Earth but
that distance can be as high as 401 million kilometers
That means that whenever humanity finally gets around to
landing a human on a planet,
that person will be 986 times further away
from Earth than the astronauts who
landed on the moon were.
In addition the time delay for sending a message from
Mars back to Earth isn't just two and a
half seconds, it's actually more like 20
minutes each direction.
Which would render instant communication in the
event of an emergency impossible.
When we zoom out even further away we can find
the Voyager 1 space probe,
which is the farthest away man-made object from Earth
it is currently located 138 AU's from The Earth.
AU meaning astronomical unit,
which is the distance between the
Earth and the Sun,
which means that Voyager 1
is 138 times further away from us than the Sun is.
At some point on its long voyage,
Voyager 1 turned its camera around and took this photograph.
It may not look
like much at first, but in my opinion
this is the greatest single photograph
ever taken in all of human history.
This tiny pale blue dot is Earth and I don't
think that anybody has ever said
something as amazing about this
as Carl Sagan when he said,
"If you look at it, you see a dot.
That's here. That's home. That's us.
On it, everyone you ever heard of,
every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings.
Thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines.
Every hunter and every forager.
Every hero and coward.
Every creator and destroyer of civilizations.
Every king and every peasant.
Every young couple in love.
Every hopeful child.
Every mother and every father.
Every inventor and explorer.
Every teacher of morals.
Every corrupt politician.
Every superstar.
Every Supreme Leader.
Every saint and sinner in the
history of our species lived there,
on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
Voyager 1 is currently traveling at 17
kilometers every single second, but even
at that speed it won't break out of the
reach of our solar system for another 30,000 years.
Once we go beyond the solar system,
we arrive in our interstellar neighborhood.
Here we shift to the Lightyear unit of measurement which is
the distance that light travels in a
full earth year or about 9.461 trillion kilometers.
The star Proxima Centauri here,
is the closest other star to us
other than our Sun, but it's still 4.24
light-years away from us.
To put that into perspective,
if it was heading in
the right direction, it would still take
Voyager 1 over 70,000 years to reach it.
In other words, if you drove your car at
100 kilometers an hour
like in our previous example to The Moon it
would take over six times longer than
the entire age of the universe is
just to finally get there and it wouldn't
even exist still when you arrived.
When we zoom out even further, we can see the entire Milky Way galaxy.
Inside of which, Earth is located right here.
This yellow dot is the farthest extent of humanity's
radio broadcasts throughout history.
Which means that any possible aliens who live
outside of this range are totally
unaware of humanity's presence.
It's complete silence outside of this yellow
dot as far as we are currently aware, but
the entire galaxy spans over 100,000
light-years from end to end.
There are over 100 billion stars and over 100
billion planets inside of our galaxy, but
you have never seen the full glory of
the galaxy at night.
Because 99% of the
stars that you can see with the naked
eye are limited to this small tiny
region right here.
But even this massive galaxy is nothing
compared to the rest of what's out to there.
Zooming out even further and we
arrive at the local group of galaxies.
A collection of 54 different galaxies that
is about 10 million light-years across.
But zooming out even further and we can
see the Virgo Supercluster.
Of which the local group here is just a tiny segment of.
There are at least 100 other groups
of galaxies just like our own local
group inside of here.
And the distance from one side to the other is a
mind-numbing 110 million light-years
But even the massive Virgo supercluster is
nothing but a quiet and tiny lobe of the
great Laniakea Supercluster.
An enormous structure that is home to our galaxies
as well as 100,000 other galaxies.
The distance from one side to the other is
520 million light-years.
But from even there, we can zoom out all the way to the
entire observable universe and see that
even the Titanic Laniakea Supercluster
is just a tiny and insignificant part of everything.
This is the observable universe and it contains everything that we know of.
It is home to at least
2 trillion different individual galaxies.
Which together contain more stars than there are grains
of sand on the entire Earth.
The distance from Earth to any side of the observable universe
is 46.5 billion light-years.
Which means that the entire width
is 93 billion light-years across.
What's perhaps even more interesting however is
what actually lies beyond the observable universe.
Keep in mind that the
observable universe is all that we can currently see.
And it's entirely possible
that the rest of the universe outside of it
is vastly larger and more fantastic
than we can possibly ever imagine.
We simply don't know what else is out there.
Because the light from these
incredibly distant places has not yet
had enough time in the universe's
history to reach us yet, back on Earth
and the light from some places may never reach us at all.
Because some parts of
space very far away from Earth are
expanding away from us faster than the speed of light.
That means that the light
from these places will never in an
infinite amount of time, reach Earth.
Meaning that even if Humanity is eternal
and exists forever, there will still be
an unknown number of places in the
universe that we will never know about or ever see.
So it is very likely that
It's unbelievably enormous as it seems,
the observable universe is just a tiny
slice of what we can currently see of
the entire universe.
According to the Theory of Cosmic Inflation that was
proposed by Dr. Alan Guth.
If it is assumed that cosmic inflation began at
10 to the -37th of a second after the Big Bang
and with the
assumption that the size of the universe
before inflation began was equal to its
age times the speed of light.
Then this would seem to suggest that at the present day,
the entire universe is 150
sextillion times larger than the
observable universe.
That number for reference looks like this.
With this many zeros,
let this number sink in for just a moment.
This would be similar to you
thinking that the entire observable universe.
Everything that you could see
was the size of a light bulb, but then
realizing that in reality, the entire universe
is larger than the former planet of Pluto.
Imagine a light bulb in the center
of Pluto, but we inside the light bulb
we're totally unaware that Pluto existed outside of it.
And that's a similar situation to this.
We are all so unbelievably small,
but you shouldn't
worry, because all that means is that
there is so much left out there for us
to discover together.